Wargaming, Ritual Magic And Other Musings...

 I have always had an interest in the power of ritual and ritualistic behaviour. 

Any hobby is ritualistic, in that it has it's rules, secrets, paraphenalia and knowledge. At their best, wargaming/roleplaying were the most occult of all hobbies, save perhaps folk dancing.

As the hobby has been exposed to the light, in that constant chasing of profit and an 'angle'. I guess that being reliant on the hobby for my own living, I am guilty in my own way, but in my defence, I do try to keep alive the wonder and creativity which I myself encountered over 4 decades ago now.

As you know, I made a hard decision to not continue simply piling up 'stuff', engaging in that self deceit so many of us seem to believe, that a gamer cannot die whilst they have unpainted figures.

Let me tell you straight, that they can and some truly great ones, have.

The late Pete Armstrong was one of those taken way to early, leaving three young daughters and a loving wife, a few years back.

Pete as many of you may be aware was the last manager of the Hammersmith GW store, but more importantly was one of the innovators in the hobby with his painting and model making, as he broke all the rules that school and college drilled into those of us who took art seriously. He was an alchemist, who showed me that you could actually transmute lead into gold.

I miss Pete. He was wry, sarcastic with his teenage acolytes to a degree that could be  taken as abuse in this soft, flacid world. But, we took our licks and we learned that the voice was every bit as powerful as the fist, and that a quick wit could literally disarm an opponent.

I last saw Pete in 2015 at the last Triples show I attended, and we'd had a few online differences of opinion. I guess that Pete still saw me as that awkward 14 year old kid (I was, I am, deep inside, as we all are and should always remember that) and I was a stubborn, aggressive fucker who at that time did not appreciate that Pete had a respect and affection of sorts for me.

He proudly introduced me to his eldest daughter and I, arrogant bastard that I was, basically cut Pete dead. I cut dead someone who, I realise now was one of the reasons I stayed with this hobby, determined to live up to the standards of creative nerdiness he (and others from those early days) infected my generation with.

When Pete passed away, nobody saw it coming. I remember friends all having a visceral recoilling reaction to the news of the death of our Sensei. In truth, it probably hit me harder than the deaths of my parents.

I have had 'dreams', in which, if you will allow me to speak as I perceive my reality, without judgement  (Hell, judge me if you want - it's your reality as much as it's mine and what do I care if you scoff and guffaw?) I am very aware and my perceptions lack that traditional quality of a dream. It's as if I have merely passed from one room into another.

I have met Pete several times in this manner and had in-depth conversations and exchanges. Each time, I am in a bare unremarkable room, and Pete is guided in by two figures who I sense are robed, but I cannot make out their details, as if they are behind frosted glass. The first time this happened, Pete looked tired, but in true Pete style remarked 'Yes, I'm dead... Let's get that out of the way,  I don't have long'

And we talked for what felt like a couple of hours and I woke in the morning tired. I have met other gamers from my past in similar ways, with similar clarity.

I am not going to outline the details of those conversations as they are personal as well as challenging in some instances, and the experience is mine to take a away and deal with.

Anyway, I have been thinking on the concept of the wargame as a ritual exercise of late, one in which we gather together components with which we create a situation which affects those who participate.

I don't think that's as preposterous as it first seems. How many of us have 'lucky' dice, 'that' tape measure or the battered rulebook from 1980 which you just can't part with. I have seen people have bad games because something they always use in a game is misplaced or lost, the  observed effects being real and palpable for them.

How many of us have been playing a game and had a flash of accute rememberance of the past, perhaps a game as a teenager which had a certain feeling, and that feeling somehow repeats, with the resulting effect of 'temporal displacement'? For just an instant the scene around you changes and you get a flashback moment like a reversed deja vu.

I remember as a kid, when I fist experienced deja vecu, a sense that I had witnessed that moment before, lived it before, and that I knew what would happen next.

As I have got older, I've had a feeling that maybe things just are not quite as 'fixed' as I thought, and so, with that, and the concept of hobby as ritual, I am mapping out a plan to see if I can 'conjour' more of these lucid dream states. There is a chain of thought which believes there are multiplicities of realities and that actuions have the effect of moving us btween differing realities. It's an interesting one, and one which is demonstrated by the Mandela Effect (Google it).

Even if what I have experienced is an internal conversation with my own psyche, it's interesting, detailed and flawless in its depiction of people as I knew them)

So, I need to establish a ritual to affect the change in 'vibes'...

So, my bench test will be to see if I can reconnect with 1983, the people and the places. I am collecting together models from that time as well as rules. I am meticulously recreating the look of those models and those games. The models themselves are that time period incarnate. I am absorbing as much peripheral information via books, video archives even food so that I hopefully invoke whatever may possibly cause a manifestation.

If nothing happens, I'll have at least revived some memories (good and bad), but if I do manage to access that state between the past and present, I am hoping that I'll be able to control the converastion and flow, whereas before things have crept up on me. 

I am looking at my hobby as a time and a place rather than just as an activity. It's a different angle to view things from, and I am interested to see how that affects (if at all) how I approach my hobby going forward. I am also going to go to the sites of places where notable events in my gaming life took place, a sort of Grand Tour of the past.

I guess that it gbegan with the decision to 'go hard' on just a handful of periods and types of game, and it's a personal experiment which harms nobody but brings me even closer to the hobby which, without hyperbole, has been a central foundation of the preceding 44 years.

So, in addition to my growing pile of books on the 30YW, I now have a reading list  on the subjects of ritual magic and psychogeography.

I picked up a nugget of interesting info the other day that Peter J Carroll, the author of the occult volumes 'Psychonaut' and 'Liber Null' also has an interest in tabletop gaming and indeed used the 8 pointed star of Chaos long before GW tried to claim it's invention (as did Michael Moorcock of course) which has me wondering if any of the magical writings of Carroll were incorporated into Warhammer, given it's use of that symbol and the stellar rise of GW since Warhammer & 40K. Perhaps those who play those games today are partaking in a ritual themselves, the energy from which is being turned into material gain for those who head that poarticular esoteric order?

It's a thought...